Writings & Spiritual Musings

Month: January 2019

LIFE:

You’ve either got to to deal with it, or it will deal with you. Shit’s gonna happen, accept it. Some of it you’ll have caused, some of it you’ll have attracted, some of it will be beyond your control, learn from it. Life is your biggest teacher, if you’re willing to listen and learn. Things won’t always go your way. Find a new way. Keep moving forward. Time does. Learn from it.

There is no dress rehearsal for Life. This is it. Give it your all. Give it your best. Fill your life with as much and as many experiences as you can. Some will be good and some will be bad. That’s what keeps life exciting: you never truly know. Hopefully you’ll find balance along the way.

Keep your expectations high, but your acceptance higher. Nobody’s perfect, but they are unique. Find and love your uniqueness; those things that make you ‘you’. There is greatness within all of us. Seek it out in everyone you meet, and your own greatness will be reflected back at you. Add love to every situation, good or bad. Love is the energy of Life. Love your friends. Love your family. Love yourself. But love your enemies more, because we are all one. We are all love. We are all Life.

Live your life so you can look forward to the future, if you are lucky enough to have one. Don’t dwell on the past, it’s a ship that’s sailed and is never coming back. Regrets, like grudges, will drown you, let them go, forgive, seek forgiveness, and swim on. Embrace the present, for that is all you ever have and will have. Unwrap it as the gift it is. This is all you have and all you are.

This is your life, live it your way, on your terms. Don’t try and live someone else’s life for them, and don’t let them tell you how to live yours. Be grateful for everything you have. Even if others have more, there are many more with less. Seek them out. Help your fellow Man. In helping and serving others you will gain much, much more than you could ever give.

If you only ever believe in one thing, believe in yourself. Respect your elders, but accept they may not know what’s truly right for you. Pursue your dreams, for that is the rainbow that will bring your happiness to life. You are never given a dream without the ability to achieve it. But know your true happiness always is within you.

Live your life with passion. Laugh as often as you can, but never at anyone else’s expense, unless it’s your own.

I hope when you look back on your life you’ll smile, feel proud, and even if nobody else noticed, at least you knew you were here.

Think about it. What is stopping YOU from taking on the world and becoming EVERYTHING you were BORN to BE…? It’s not space, I can tell you that much! It’s…

F-E-A-R…!

Fuck

Everything

And

Run…!

That’s MY acronym. But eventually you’ll run out of energy and stop. But guess what, FEAR is right there with you, because it’s within you, with you, around you. The ONLY way to combat fear is to take it on with action. So, in Part Three, the next step in taking control over your fears is to list the top three fears you have and tackle them head-on!

What are YOUR top three fears?

This is the biggest step you’ll ever take in overcoming your fears. Once you KNOW that everybody has them, but doesn’t know how to deal with them, hopefully you’ll feel more comfortable sharing your insecurities. Once they are out of your head and in the public domain, they have no more power over you, especially if you have taken the steps to love yourself and invest in your own self-value.

In the spirit of sharing, here are my three biggest fears:

Asking for help/ showing weakness

Opening up/ Letting people in

Lack of recognition/ rejection

I think I’ve tackled them in this blog post, and that was part of the idea. I still need help, but I’ve done it. The next step is having the confidence to get out there and do some public speaking on the subject…!

Once you know what your top three fears are, make a conscious effort every day to do what scares you most. Take baby steps at first, but make it part of your daily routine. After a while the feeling of fear will become less and less until it becomes small enough to manage. It may even disappear completely! Trust me, once you have taken control over your fears, there really will be nothing to hold you back in life.

After the overwhelming response to How To Overcome Fear 101, my first article on the subject, I decided to do overcoming fear 202, or Part Two!

We’ve all experienced fear at one time or another, so let’s just dwell on that for a minute. Here’s a short exercise that might help you the next time fear arises in your life:

Think of something in the past you were afraid of, but aren’t any more.

Go back in time in your memory to when you were afraid (it won’t feel the same, as you’ve gone past it, but try to remember how you felt)

Try as best as you can to visualize yourself trying to confront it.

The more you thought about NOT doing it, the bigger and more frightening it became, right?

What did you do and think about to NOT confront it?

That didn’t help, did it?

Now either one of two things happened: A. You were forced to confront it, or B. You were brave enough to tackle it yourself.

You came out the other side and YOU SURVIVED…!

Overcoming fear is a daily challenge for us all at some level. What is scary to some isn’t for others, don’t let other people laugh at your fears, they are genuine and justified! Learning to confront and deal with our fears is part of life. How you choose to deal with your fear obstacles will determine how far you go in life. As you remember back to that fear you overcame, what did you do to overcome it?

If you can relate to the exercise above, why not think about that a little longer while I share my favorite quotation:

“Fear lives in the future.

Regret lives in the past.

Live in the Present, for that is what it is, a gift.”

AND that is my best advice to you when dealing with FEAR… bring it into the present moment. If you’d followed the guidance of article one, you’ve written it down, you’ve taken it out of your head, now it’s time to live in the NOW.

Far too many people are not living the lives they were born to live, because they are afraid of what might happen. In all my years of working with people, the two biggest obstacles are fear of DEATH and fear of the UNKNOWN. Personally, I lump them both together, as none of us know what death actually is, so it’s unknown. So, what are they actually afraid of when they say they are scared of Death or the Unknown?

My answer is that they don’t know who they are.

I don’t want to get too philosophical, but we can’t know Death until we die, and by definition the unknown is unknowable, so why stress and worry about it? At the core of both is the questioner – your self – you are not dead, and if you know yourself, you know enough to live your life.

My FREE BOOK weekend was a big success, so thank you to all of you that partook. I hope you find it useful in getting a great start to 2019. However, some people who have read my book, “My First Goal-Setting Book”, have written to me asking about overcoming fear, so I thought I’d tackle this subject in a blog post.

I deliberately left this out of the book, as it is aimed at people that already have dreams and goals in mind, and have already overcome the hurdle of inactivity due to fear, but I’ll cover it simply below.

Many of you may have heard of the acronym for fear:

False

Expectations

Appearing

Real

The first thing to know about fear is that it’s natural. Everybody at some time in their lives (yes, even me!) experiences fear. Now, just so we are all on the same page here, when I talk about fear in this context I’m not relating to phobias nor situations of mortal danger, I’m referring to negative mental games we play with ourselves that stop us acting on our goals and dreams. You may be surprised to know that fear is the major reason the vast majority of people never even TRY to do anything new or different in their lives!

So, if we all experience fear, how come some people allow it to stop them, and others deal with it and get on with life?

Even successful people feel fear from time to time, the difference is they have developed systems to combat that fear and move through it. I’m going to highlight a few basic techniques you can use to overcome most of your fears.

1. Write It Down!

Most of our fears are ‘mental demons’, they live in our heads, we try to hide them, certainly never talking about them, and the more we feed our fears with attention, the more our imaginations run wild. Take a few moments to write down EXACTLY what it is you think you are scared of. Often times just the exercise of really thinking about it ON PAPER is enough to put it in perspective.

2. Action ALWAYS Cures Fear!

The next time you feel fear, shorten the time between feeling scared and actually acting on it. As said, most fears are not real, they are mental monsters, and the longer we sit on them without acting, the bigger they become. Perhaps you have a phone call to make, but you are scared of how it will go, rather than dwell on it, just pick up the phone and make the call. Perhaps you want to ask someone out on a date, why wait until someone else asks them out, just go for it!

3. Play It In Reverse.

This is the one that I find most useful in my life. Whatever it is I’m procrastinating about or scared of doing – usually those awkward phone calls! – I write down what I’m scared of, then I picture the outcome I want, I really get in touch with how I FEEL after I’ve made that call. I play the scene backwards with that feeling. Only when I feel totally calm and comfortable do I make that call. You know what, over 90% of the time the call goes exactly as I imagined it.

Obviously there’s not enough space in one blog to fully cover this topic – there are hundred of books on the subject, if you wish to find out more – but these are just some of the tricks that I use and work for me. As with most new things, it’s going to take some time and practice, but of all the things you can learn in life, getting a grip on your fears will be one of the best things you did.

I’d love to hear how you get on, so just drop me some of your experiences in the comments section below.

Most authors of self-help books might be cashing in at this time of the year, especially if it’s one about setting goals and New Year’s Resolutions, but because I want people to actually read and benefit from my book, it’s FREE all this weekend, and if you can’t afford to buy the book after this offer expires, you can email me here and I’ll send you a free pdf or audio file!